Compare Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. IBM Security Network IPS
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 | Alexander Rudenko Team Lead at a tech services company |
Use IBM Security Network IPS? Share your opinion.
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, GFI, Vectra AI and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software. Updated: May 2021.
511,307 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."
"It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
"The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment."
"Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day."
"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."
"Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments."
"Cisco technical support is unbeatable. It offers a premium service every time."
"The whole solution is very good, and stable."
"The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."
"I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering."
"In general, the features are all great. However, if I need to take hardware for ASA, because they need to upgrade to Firepower, we want to create rules. For that, most of the time we go to the command line. Right now Firepower is working really hard on the grid. You can apply all those rules to the grid. Even if you want to monitor the logs, for example, the activity will tell you which particular user has been blocked because of that rule. Firepower's monitoring interface is very good, because you can see each and every piece. ASA also had it, but there you needed to type the command and be under the server to see all that stuff. In Firepower you have the possibility to go directly to the firewall. The way the monitoring is displayed is also very nice. The feature I appreciate most in Firepower is actually the grid. The grid has worked very well."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that."
"The most valuable feature is its simplicity."
Cons
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
"We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events."
"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."
"One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it."
"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."
"Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated."
"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."
"It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability."
"Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience."
"The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market."
"The customization of the rules can be simplified."
"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."
"If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy."
"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have."
"We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco."
"In the future, I would like to see a hybrid option so that we can work both on-premises and in the cloud."
"We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"The pricing is high."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"The cost of operations is very low."
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software solutions are best for your needs.
511,307 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Top Answer: It has helped us to organize our security. We get a better overview on what is happening on the network, which has… more »
Top Answer: The pricing is high. Darktrace was also pricey.
Top Answer: The solution’s ability to reduce false positives and help you focus on the highest-risk threats is mostly good. It is… more »
Top Answer: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly.
Top Answer: We bought the appliance, which comes with a license as well. While I don't know the exact pricing, most of these… more »
Top Answer: I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it.
Top Answer: The most valuable feature is its simplicity.
Top Answer: The cost of operations is very low.
Top Answer: The features are slightly behind what else is available in the market, which is something that IBM has to improve on… more »
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Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
Sourcefire SNORT
Security Network Intrusion Prevention System, IBM Security Network Protection, XGS, GX
Vectra® is the leader in network detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito® platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using artificial intelligence to collect, store and enrich network metadata with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers three applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Cognito Stream™ sends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Cognito Recall™ is a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. And Cognito Detect™ uses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed.
Snort is an open-source, rule-based, intrusion detection and prevention system. It combines the benefits of signature-, protocol-, and anomaly-based inspection methods to deliver flexible protection from malware attacks. Snort gained notoriety for being able to accurately detect threats at high speeds.
IBM Security Network Intrusion Prevention System appliances are designed to stop constantly evolving threats before they impact your business. This means providing both high levels of protection and performance, while lowering the overall cost and complexity associated with deploying and managing a large number of point solutions.
Learn more about Vectra AI
Learn more about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Learn more about IBM Security Network IPS
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Equifax, Christian Hospital Centre
Financial Services Firm25%
Mining And Metals Company17%
Retailer17%
University17%
Comms Service Provider29%
Computer Software Company22%
Financial Services Firm6%
Government6%
Comms Service Provider34%
Computer Software Company18%
Government9%
Financial Services Firm6%
Computer Software Company31%
Comms Service Provider23%
Financial Services Firm6%
Retailer6%
Small Business8%
Midsize Enterprise8%
Large Enterprise85%
Small Business26%
Midsize Enterprise21%
Large Enterprise53%
Small Business33%
Midsize Enterprise33%
Large Enterprise33%
No Data Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, GFI, Vectra AI and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software. Updated: May 2021.
511,307 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is ranked 6th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software with 13 reviews while IBM Security Network IPS is ranked 16th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software with 1 review. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is rated 7.4, while IBM Security Network IPS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT writes "Intelligent with good threat detection capabilities but could be easier to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Security Network IPS writes "Simple to use, quick to integration, and the cost of operations is low". Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is most compared with Cisco Stealthwatch, Fortinet FortiWeb, Darktrace, Check Point IPS and Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System, whereas IBM Security Network IPS is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Stealthwatch, Trend Micro Deep Discovery and Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System.
See our list of best Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software vendors.
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